What To Do When Your Dealers Aren't Meeting Their Sales Quotas

Automotive dealerships assign sales quotas to their dealers. The dealers, regardless of pecking order, must meet their quotas if the dealership is going to turn a monthly profit and still pay its employees. If your dealers are failing to meet their quotas, you do have a few options/solutions.  From most negative to most positive, here are your options/solutions.

Fire Them

Ouch. That hurts. It is not always the best option, but when you need to produce money for the company and you are not producing at all, it may just be time for the ax. Of course, if these dealers were your top producers a few months ago, maybe all they need is a little extra motivation.

Provide Them with a Little Extra Motivation

Incentives work wonders for sales. You can either run a contest where all the dealers strive for a prize, or you can offer extra motivation in the form of a raise if the dealers each sell "x" number of cars in the coming months.  The latter bit of motivation can even be tailored for those dealers who have not been with the dealership long, for the older dealers who have not received a raise in a while, and/or for the dealers who are in a complete slump. At the very least, you would not have to fire anybody...yet.

Use Automotive Dealership Coaching

Automotive dealership coaching is a month-long consultation to see where things are going wrong. It is a better solution to firing people because the consultant follows each dealer around for a couple of days and takes notes. Copies of the notes are given to you and each dealer in a private meeting. The consultant sums up what he/she saw and what was good and bad in each case. This tells you which employees need more training versus which employees maybe should be fired.

In addition to the shadowing and analyzing portions of this service, the consultant offers training and coaching sessions to dealers. If you decide not to fire anyone and you want to keep everyone, the consultant will help train or retrain each dealer that seems to need the extra help. If these dealers respond well and turn around and their sales quotas are met again (or exceeded!), then everyone remains on the team. You can consider this a positive learning experience for everyone involved. If you ever need more coaching, you know where to turn, too.